Catholic schools too dear for some

Catholic schools are being urged to consider freezing fees to address the growing number of families that are struggling to afford them.

The Catholic Education Commission of Victoria - which oversees the state's 476 Catholic schools - has asked principals to temporarily stop raising fees as a way of providing extra relief to poorer families.

In a letter sent to schools, the commission has also told principals to come up with other strategies that might ease the burden. These include ideas such as increasing bursaries or allowing more families to pay their fees in weekly or monthly instalments.

Executive director Susan Pascoe said: "What we're really wanting is for each school to think about how, particularly, the needier families can get access.

"For example, a school might try to keep 2005 fees at 2004 levels, or it might try only to have a CPI increase, or it might increase the number of bursaries or fee relief strategies it's got for each family."

The call comes after a joint study by Monash University and the Australian Council for Educational Research found that fewer Victorian families could afford to send their children to Catholic schools, where fees have increased by up to 40 per cent over four years.

Some of the top-end Catholic schools, such as Xavier College, have tuition fees that exceed $13,000 a year.

Ms Pascoe said in some cases, parents' inability to afford fees had led to a drop in enrolments.

Figures show that while the independent primary school sector in Victoria has surged by nearly 2 per cent in the past 10 years, Catholic primary enrolments have dropped by 1.4 per cent.

"At one school, a parent at the end of last year withdrew because they couldn't pay their fees," Ms Pascoe said.

"The principal said the fees didn't matter . . . but the family had a certain amount of pride and just felt as though they'd be a second-class citizen."

The Federal Government recently announced an extra $362 million for Catholic schools over the next four years, with Victoria to receive an increase of $118 million over that period.

Ms Pascoe said it was crucial that the funding was passed on to families through fee relief.

But she added that while some schools were already giving parents partial or full-fee exemptions, principals could only stretch their budgets so far in the face of rising teacher salaries and other school costs.

Nick Marinelli, principal at St John's primary school in Heidelberg, said that the need to give fee concessions to poorer families had to be balanced with the need to provide a quality education for all students.

"But my own personal philosophy is that any family that said they couldn't afford the fees and would have to leave should be given support," he said.

Rosalie Jones, president of the Principals' Association of Victorian Catholic Secondary Schools, said it would be difficult for schools to freeze next year's fees at this year's levels unless they received extra government subsidies.